Clarification on Elastic Beats 9.x X-Pack Licensing

Elastic Stack Beats
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Subject: Clarification on Elastic Beats 9.x X-Pack Licensing

Hi,

I'm looking for clarification on the licensing terms applicable to the X-Pack components in the Elastic Beats 9.x source code.

While reviewing the Beats 9.5.4 / 9.5.5 source, I noticed the following:

  • X-Pack source files contain the header "Licensed under the Elastic License".

  • The X-Pack magefile sets BeatLicense="Elastic License".

  • The licenses/ELASTIC-LICENSE.txt file contains the 2018 Elastic License Agreement, rather than ELv2.

  • Section 2.1 of the agreement appears to restrict derivative works of the source code to "reasonable testing purposes".

I would appreciate clarification on the following:

  1. Is the X-Pack directory in Elastic Beats 9.x still governed by the original 2018 Elastic License, or has it transitioned to ELv2 or AGPLv3, similar to Elasticsearch and Kibana?

  2. What are the licensing implications of modifying X-Pack source code, compiling it, and using the resulting binary in a third-party application?

  3. Does the licensing position differ when using unmodified binaries from the official Elastic distribution rather than compiling from modified source code?

  4. If someone builds exclusively from the OSS targets (for example, Filebeat and Metricbeat without X-Pack), are all components of the resulting binaries covered by Apache License 2.0?

  5. Do the same licensing restrictions apply to X-Pack Metricbeat modules, including Tomcat, MSSQL, Oracle, IBM MQ, SQL, ActiveMQ, and IIS?

  6. If additional permissions are required for using or modifying X-Pack components beyond the permissions granted by the standard licence, is there a commercial licensing or OEM arrangement available?

I'm primarily interested in understanding the applicable licence boundaries and the permissions granted for source modification, compilation, and redistribution.

Pointers to the authoritative licence documentation or relevant Elastic licensing contacts would be appreciated.

Thanks.

2

Thanks for reporting this.
We made the team aware of this and indeed there are few things that needs to be updated.

Thanks again. Much appreciated.
I'll will update the thread when I have more details, unless someone from the team does it.